Monero, like Bitcoin, has a strong focus on providing nation-state level censorship resistance, and this extends to their thoughtfulness on their governance structure. Derek Hsue does a good job uncovering this governance and relating it to similar projects like ZCash and Bitcoin. Most interesting is the way Monero funds projects, and how their lead developer purposefully reduces the developer decentralization by trolling everyone and the project itself.

News

Mt. Gox continues to punish the Bitcoin "price" on the markets with the recent news that the trustee of the Mt. Gox assets (a.k.a. a buttload of Bitcoin) has been selling Bitcoin on the market to raise fiat to make the creditors whole. Stephan Livera does a good job putting this in perspective and makes the case that this is a natural event and that Bitcoin's fundamentals haven't changed. You might want to bookmark this page in case the trustee decides to unload more of the $1.9 billion Bitcoin he's sitting on.

One of the biggest risks to Bitcoin isn't exchanges getting hacked, or the price crashing, or world governments. It's miner centralisation. If a single miner is able to get a majority of the hash-power of the network, this grand experiment might fail. That's why the BDPL is so important: by giving miners and mining equipment manufacturers a pretty big carrot for adding their patents for defensive use only, no single miner can monopolize an innovation that leads to them capturing the entire market. Let's hope it works 🙏🏽

Development

Lightning development continues apace with great user-experience improvements like this one by the LND team (one of the three main Lightning clients) to bring phrase seeding to Lightning wallets, allowing for easy backup and restore similar to most Bitcoin wallets. It looks like they've started with the Bitcoin standard BIP39 with some nice improvements

It's nice to see this post from @nopara73 with a new wallet UI idea. I've tried out a bunch of different wallets for iOS and they all follow almost the exact same top-level UI: a list of transactions. This always seemed a little strange to be considering the most important thing in Bitcoin you'd want to track is your unspent outputs. Here is to hoping someone picks this up and runs with it.

Tools

I'll definitely be adding this great little tool by GNU/Karel that provides some great documentation for the available Bitcoin Core RPC commands, complete with examples in both the command line and using JSON-RPC.